My recently finished PhD student, Ana Sequeira, has not only just had a superb paper just accepted in Global Change Biology, she’s recently been offered (and accepted) a postdoctoral position based at the University of Western Australia‘s Oceans Institute (in partnership with AIMS and CSIRO). As any supervisor, I’m certainly pleased when a student completes her PhD, but my pride as an academic papa truly soars when she gets her first job. Well done, Ana. This post by Ana is about her latest paper.

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Following our previous whale shark work (see here, here, here, here, here, here and here), especially the recent review where we inferred global connectivity and suggest possible pathways for their migration, we have now gone a step further and modelled the habitat suitability for the species at at global scale. This paper sets a nice scene regarding current habitat suitability, which also demonstrates the potential connectivity pathways we hypothesised previously. But the paper goes much further; we extend our predictions to a future scenario for 2070 when water temperatures are expected to increase on average by 2 °C.

Regarding the current range of whale sharks (i.e., its currently suitable habitat), we already know that whale sharks span latitudes between about 35 º North to South. We also know that this geographical range has been exceeded on several occasions. What we did not know was whether conditions were suitable enough for whale sharks to cross from the Indian Ocean to the Atlantic Ocean – in other words, whether they could travel between ocean basins south of South Africa. Our global model results demonstrate that suitable habitat in this region does exist at least during the summer, thus supporting our hypotheses regarding global connectivity!

It’s true that the extensive dataset we used (30 years’ worth of whale shark sightings collected by tuna purse seiners in the three major oceans – data provided by the IRD, IOTC and SPC) has many caveats (as do all opportunistically collected data), but we went to great trouble to deal with them in this paper (you can request a copy here or access it directly here). And the overall result: the current global habitat suitability for whale sharks does agree well with current locations of whale shark occurrence, with the exception of the Eastern Pacific for where we did not have enough data to validate. Read the rest of this entry »

We’ve mentioned our previous whale shark research before (see here and here for previous posts, and see the end of this post for a full list of our whale shark publications), but this is a lovely extension of that work by my recently completed PhD student, Ana Sequeira.

Her latest contribution, Inferred global connectivity of whale shark Rhincodon typus populations just published online in Journal of Fish Biology, describes what a lot of whale shark punters & researchers alike have suspected for a long time – global connectivity of all the oceans’ whale shark populations. The problem hasn’t been a lack of ‘evidence’ for this per se; there is now sufficient evidence from genetic studies that at least on the generational scale (a single generation could be up to 37 years long), populations among the major ocean basins are connected via migration (Castro et al. 2007; Schmidt et al. 2009). The problem instead is that no one has ever observed a shark voyage between ocean basins, nor has anyone really suggested how and over what time scales this (must) happen.

My PhD student, Ana Sequeira, has just written a great little guest blog post for the Environment Institute‘s blog. Given I’m en route to Tasmania for a quick consultancy meeting, I thought I’d let myself off the hook and reproduce the post here. Well done, Ana (and hint to my other students – your time on ConservationBytes.com is coming…).

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This week is Seaweek and guest blogger Ana Sequeira describes how whale shark distribution might be shifting according to seasonal environmental predictors.

Ana Sequeira is a PhD student at the University of Adelaide (Global Ecology Group). Her main research interests are to develop models applied to the marine environment to describe key environmental processes, species distribution patterns and ecological interactions.

The main objective of her PhD thesis is to investigate behavioural ecology of whale sharks. She is now trying to understand which environmental variables may affect whale shark distribution.

The whale shark (Rhincodon typus, Smith 1828) is the largest fish in the ocean and can reach more than 12 m in total length. Although little is known about their habitat selection or migration patterns, the whale shark appears to be a highly mobile species. They predictably form near shore aggregations in some coastal locations (e.g. off Ningaloo reef in Western Australia) what makes them the subject of highly lucrative marine ecotourism industries. Also, artisanal and small-scale fisheries for the species still exist in many parts of the tropics.